If you have ever wanted to know what song your iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad just switched to, then there is a great new free jailbreak tweak available on the BigBoss repo by iOS developer and hacker Ryan Petrich dubbed MusicBanners. As you can see from the image above, MusicBanners renders an iOS 5 notification banner with your song information, album artwork, and Music application icon on it. This banner appears every time that a song begins playing on your iDevice, even if one was already playing and it started playing a new song.

MusicBanners is beautifully integrated into iOS. The way it works is as soon as your device starts playing an audio file, the banner pops up. MusicBanners works with a variety of different music-listening applications including Music, Grooveshark, Spotify, and more. You aren't limited to Apple's Music application by any means, which to me, makes MusicBanners very valuable. Because it uses the iOS 5 banners, you need to be on at least iOS 5 to use MusicBanners. It doesn't have any options to configure, it's one of those plug-and-play tweaks that just works when you install it.

The response time for MusicBanners is perfect. It doesn't appear too early or too late when a song begins. The banner stays up for the same amount of time that a notification banner for, say Messages, would appear for. Then after some seconds, it disappears on its own. The tweak is very simply but has a very satisfying effect.

Since it is technically a notification, this tweak isn't for everyone. You have to like getting notifications, or else it could get annoying to you. The popup will appear even if you manually change a song yourself - so you already know what will be playing. When it tells you what is playing. Redundant?

Overall, I like MusicBanners. Since it is a free tweak, you can't be too picky about it. But, it adds a nice feature to iOS that we never had before. What are your thoughts about MusicBanners? Share in the comments below!

on the package description of this app, Ryan petrich has a pic of his notification centre and has push notifications of the updates cydia has..if anyone knows the name of this tweak, I'd love to hear from you!